Nick’s brain: “Like a drunk Santa in love? That simile doesn’t make sense.”
Nick’s fingers: “UR NOT THE BOSS OF US, BRAIN!!!!!”

In case you’re wondering, after “put a mirror in front of it,” the other four things I’d do with a dolphin are:
2) Swim with that fucker.
3) See if it chases a laser pointer.
4) See if it could play Simon.
5) Let it raise a kitten from birth so they’d be friends.

Today in the lobby there was a doctor and he had all his equipment with him. I got excited because I could finally get the flu shot I’d been putting off for months. But when I asked him about it, I was informed that no, actors playing doctors on TV shows can not give flu shots.

DAMN YOU, NO ORDINARY FAMILY!

The same computer. Different operating systems. Was there a difference?

THE WINDOWS VERSION WORKED INSANELY BETTER. No graphics stuttering, no waiting for renders… I’d say it ran 30 frames per second versus 10 frames per second on the mac (sometimes 5 frames per second). The difference is undeniable. From now on, I’m buying PC games and running them in Boot Camp.

Since it’s the same hardware, does anyone out there know why it runs so much better in Windows?

Congratulations, you have received form AB 63, brought to you by SB 1146 aka The Los Angeles Tax Enforcement Program! They can be reached at (213) 473-5901. What they do is this: they go around calling everyone in Los Angeles who had 1099 income on their tax returns, because the city thinks they are businesses that should pay city taxes!

You: “But I’m not a business, I’m a writer/actor/director/whatever!”

I KNOW THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT I SAID TOO!

Here’s what you have to do: fill out the form they sent you (or find a new application online). For income, ONLY report money from 1099 earnings, and even then, only report money earned from businesses with address in Los Angeles. There are a hilariously small number of companies based in Los Angeles itself. There’s a list of zip codes on the lacity/finance website, but it basically excludes WeHo, Hollywood, Glendale, Burbank, Santa Monica, and anyone NOT LA. So your 1099 income might be… small. It will probably be ZERO.

When you submit your application, be sure to include a letter stating that you are a “creative artist” as defined by LAMC 21.29.(b) There is a $300,000/year allowance for the likes of you, so don’t sweat it.

Mail that stuff in! Relax! Have some Oreos or something!

What happens next is magical. You are registered as a creative artist! They should leave you alone in the future. But the city will send you a bill for BACK TAXES, and depending on your numbers from previous years, that bill might be small or large. Again, it will probably be zero. But no matter what, you must pay this money. Sorry.

But!

If you write them a check for the principle and the interest, and then add a letter that says “I was unaware of these city taxes, so please waive the penalty,” they will waive the penalty! As if by magic! You will save 40 percent! THAT IS CRAZY HOW MUCH THE PENALTY IS, AND HOW EASY IT IS TO NOT PAY IT!

But odds are you earned 0 dollars on those Los Angeles-based 1099s, because corporations are smarter than governments. The End.

Six months earlier the question had been: did our family want a trip to France with family friends? Yes! Yes! A thousand times Yes! And so, like an art deco Pan Am travel poster, our first week was filled with capital-a Adventure:

SEE THE BAYEAUX TAPESTRY!!! (See a two-mile carpet with dudes on it!)
ENJOY SAUSAGE SANDWICHES!!! (Enjoy a cadmium red hot dog resting on a croque-monsieur!)
EXPERIENCE ROUNDABOUTS!!! (Experience them over and over, because Peter and Pat like to check maps while driving in circles!)

But now there was this problem with Peter’s car. The men, including the 13-year-old boy who would grow up to be Nick Confalone, took turns investigating the engine. Yep, the car was broken all right, and there was the engine right there, and the problem had to do with the gas, or the engine, or both, we concluded, like the manly men we were. We’d stopped somewhere between La Rochelle and Bordeaux, in a tiny town with a name like D’ardenté, which I became convinced was the French word for YOUR CAR IS BROKEN FOREVER AND YOU ARE DOOMED!!!!

But wait, a tow truck! A taxi! All our problems were over! Our families united in the taxi and our car, and we followed the tow truck to destiny. First, we crossed a massive bridge, the biggest I’d ever seen. The toll: six million francs one way, or six million and one francs for a round trip. The toll burned deep into my dad’s soul, but he thought, at least we can save one franc and get the one-way, because we’re never coming back. (That’s foreshadowing, baby.)

You know, the most rewarding part of traveling is noticing the little cultural differences. For example, in America, tow trucks take broken cars to service stations, but in France they take you to deserted airfields. This is one cultural difference I noticed. As the tow truck driver was ready to dump the broken car at the deserted airfield, Kristi took the reigns with her second-year French: “Attendez. Je m’appelle Kristi. Ca va? J’aime le pomplemousse.”

Peter, not a man to be satisfied with such inefficient pleasantries, took a different approach with his fluent German. Now there were two people talking to this man, in different languages, trying to convince him to take the broken car to a service station. Somehow Kristi deduced that the car was diesel, but it had been filled with regular gas, and that was the problem. “It was filled with regular gas,” she said, passive voice, blameless, like, “…mistakes were made.” Somehow she pantomimed her message, and tow truck driver realized that this was no ordinary abandoned-airfield-calibre situation. He locked down the car and we were off.

Back to the bridge! Wait– what? Noooooooo!

Six million more francs and one sulking dad later, we found ourselves at a service station. But not before Kristi’s rite of passage into adulthood: driving on an off-ramp, against the flow of traffic, the car in reverse, Kristi without a driver’s license, in a foreign country, driving stick for the first time. On that day, she made her father proud and truly earned her family name. (Tracey would earn hers a few years later, when in Cannes, she realized she could order unlimited screwdrivers from the French bartender and charge it to Peter’s hotel room.)

At this point, the wise and gentle tow truck driver departed our lives forever, leaving us in the capable hands of Service Station Man, caretaker of The Most Magical Place on Earth. Another Pan Am poster:

SPEND TIME AT A HOMELESS MAD SCIENTIST’S AUTO PART GRAVEYARD!

Like a true world-traveler, I reclined on an airline seat– one seat of an entire row ripped wholesale out of a 737 and dropped, as if by magic, into this man’s dirt-caked junk yard– and watched Peter explain the problem to the guy, but it was futile, like he was trying to explain the diels-alder reactions to a drunk pirate. But then finally there came a spark of recognition, when a massive Cujo junkyard dog snarled and Peter weirdly called it a “hound dog,” or maybe the dog’s name was Elvis, but either way…

“Ah!” The grizzly bearded child-molesting service station man said, in English, finally understanding. “You know Elvis? The king, the king!”

It was suddenly so clear. There was only one way to get this car fixed, so Peter, my dad, and the Service Station Man sang Elvis’s Hound Dog together, and through the power of music, a new car appeared, good as new, and everyone piled in. We waved goodbye to all our new friends and drove off into the sunset together. Actually what really happened was the new car had a broken trunk but we were like WHO CARES LET’S GET OUT OF HERE VRRROOOOM!

You are certainly not incorrect in saying that even a simple gift from the heart, like a pocket dictionary for example, would have made you the happiest of all birthday girls. And truly, I could have showered you with uncountable presents like you were the great and powerful King Farouk. But you are the singular love of my life. Any attempt to infuse a lowly physical object with such emotional grandeur would be an exercise in belittlement, an aggressive and apostatic act against affection itself.

Wait! Do you remember that sunlight morning three months when I surprised you with breakfast in bed? And it wasn’t even your birthday. Although most reasonable people would say yes, that glorious breakfast indeed counts as a birthday present, I look into your ambiguously scornful eyes and see that to you, no, it does not count as a birthday present–though it was truly a great and heroic deed on my behalf. I only brought it up to make sure you remembered it happened.

Fine. Suppose, for the sake of ending this argument, I had gotten you that pocket dictionary, the one you now claim would have made a perfectly passable present. Yes, I’ll be the second to admit that such a present would have shown I’d noticed your developing love for new words, words that ensure linguistic supremacy on the Scrabble board. So let us suppose, dear girlfriend, I’d gotten you that pocket dictionary. What a waste of time! Don’t you know you can pretty much look up any word on the internet for free?

See, instead of wasting all that time and effort, I chose to spend that energy on you directly, in the form of a loving embrace that said “Happy Birthday,” a gesture born from profound simplicity, infinite tenderness, and absolutely not from “the fact that I’m a lazy bastich.” No matter how many times you call me that hateful and possibly made-up word, it will never be true. Also it will never be a real word, I’m pretty sure.

Still not satisfied? Then maybe you should go buy that stupid pocket dictionary yourself, so you can look up your favorite new word. That’s right. Then we’ll see who’s the real bastich (hint: the bastich is YOU). That’s right, “dear girlfriend,” walk out that door and see if you ever get another present from me! Enjoy your stupid 33rd year, your Larry Bird year, which now I’m changing to a different number 33, as in “the atomic number of Arsenic,” as in, “I hope you eat some Arsenic,” but actually I mean it like, “I hope you don’t die from the Arsenic but instead get really sick and feel bad about how mean you were to your amazingly great boyfriend,” you ungrateful bastich!

Can we talk about the subjective time in each level? I mean, the intercutting between dream levels and the subjective time between them is crazy

The technical term for that is “effing bananas.” But seriously, that takes vision. Movies are like pointillism. You make each pixel moment by moment and then it’s all put up on the canvas to fulfill the vision you saw at first, and you see it suddenly, how it all comes together. So that process took so long, so many shooting days in so many locations. That’s why the director is the guiding force, the captain of the ship. And you have to ask yourself those crucial acting questions: “Where did I just come from? What just happened? What matters right now?”

It actually sounds a lot one of the ideas in the film, how you just appear in a dream. On set, someone says “action” and you’re in a scene with no idea how you got there, no connection to what came before.

Except in both cases, it will be edited into sense.

Either by the mind, or by the director/editor.

Exactly.

Mal’s ideas reminded me of this kooky thought experiment called Quantum Immortality. The idea is that your consciousness can’t die. If you put a gun to your head and pulled the trigger, to every other observer you would die, but you’d be transported to a universe where the gun would jam. That idea has the same sort of unfortunate unverifiability that Mal proposes to Cobb: “Take a leap of faith with me… by dying?”

Quantum Immortality is such a dipshit idea that exploits the utterly unverifiable idea of quantum conflation and says, as a syllogism, that you would experience the one universe where the gun jams, because in every other one you are annihilated. That seems like pretty thin evidence to go on for such a crazy-ass proof. It’s a misappropriation of concepts from quantum theory about observers being essential to collapsing Schrödinger equations, or something.

But I think that’s part of what’s so intriguing/disturbing about Mal’s idea. There’s no real way to know if you’re dreaming or not. You can’t step outside the system. You’d just keep getting Gödel-pwn3d.

Well in that sense, without a totem, it’s utterly unverifiable whether or not you’re dreaming. It’s non-disclosable from within the system.

There’s some cool “unverifiable” analogues going on, like with Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the freefall hotel. He’s facing the classic thought experiment that lead to general relativity. There’s no way to tell if you’re in a gravitational field–

–or in an elevator being accelerated against. That comes from the basic equality of acceleration and gravity, and it led to us knowing they’re equivalent. Someone in the elevator can never know if it’s accelerating or if it’s gravity. Unverifiable, just like the dream-states.

But that’s where the totem saves the day, right?

Again, I think the fact that all these discussions are happening are a great testimony to peoples’ reactions to original ideas and original filmmaking. I’m just so glad that that’s being rewarded. It isn’t just about visual pyrotechnics or emotional pornography like some of the other summer movies are. The idea that we’re going to live in a world of Transformers and G.I. Joe for an elongated period of time is a fallacy. I just don’t think people treat those movies like they’re watching a movie that has real humanity in it. I honestly don’t think those movies really stimulate 25 or 35-year-old people. But this movie does. Two or three days later people are saying “I have to see it again I have to see it again.” It’s like we performed an inception on them.

Did you perform an inception on the people at the 8:20 Arclight showing, where the air conditioning broke and they stopped the showing halfway through? A.K.A. The Rodney King of movie screenings?

Oh God. No, I was outside with Chris Nolan though, just by coincidence. I was coming to watch the end of the 8:20. But people thought we were coming to fix it, like we’re AC guys or HVAC guys. They didn’t know at first. I mean, it was like Apocalypto. This movie would be the worst movie ever to see half of.

Maybe Nolan could have spun it like that was the intended experience. He’s the John Cage of filmmakers.

Or we could have pumped the theater full of ether and knocked everyone out fifty minutes in…

…Incept them with the ending, only make half a movie, and save half the budget?

Yeah, but why does that sound like a lawsuit waiting to happen?

I told him there’s a lot of downsides to being a bike seat, while the only upside is that you occasionally get to be smushed by some buttcheeks. First of all, it’s not like the girl will ever say, “hey bike seat, want to have some sex?” But when you’re a person, girls say that all the time! And think of all the other human things he’d be giving up as a bike seat: arts, culture, romance, and the most human gift of all– the gift of thought… all to get smushed by some buttcheeks? And even giving him the benefit of the doubt– like maybe he isn’t giving up any brain power as a bike seat, so he could still appreciate the finer things in life– that seems even worse! How cruel to be a fully-functioning mind trapped in a lowly bike seat, having all your hopes and dreams but no way to communicate or move. Your only flashes of happiness would be those ten minutes a week when that girl’s buttcheeks were smushing you. And hey Mr. Smartypants, did you think about what happens when she inevitably stops riding her bike and her buttcheeks stop smushing you? Now you’re just sitting around in the garage, or maybe outside in the rain, until she finally sells you to a fat guy. How you like those buttcheeks now?

My friend stared at me for a long time. I realized I should have just said, “Totally.”